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Definitely a fun project!! Jim Grey brought your plans to my attention on the American Road (Magazine) Forum. I encourage you to join that group as they share your interest in vintage road travel.

I can probably help if you want copies of sections of period maps and road guides. I have thousands, but perhaps a good beginning point would be a copy of a 1929 road atlas for the states traveled. It might also be fun to trace their route on the old Marked or Blazed Auto Trails. For Example, it appears that they took the Custer Battlefield Highway between Chicago and Sioux City

Do you have citations for where they stayed? Many hotels and camp grounds show up in my old publications.

I didn’t carefully peruse the list of stops, but it looks like they followed the Yellowstone Trail and National Parks Highway west of Yellowstone, and probably the Pacific Highway (now US99) south from Tacoma.

Thanks for stopping by! I am currently waiting for my registration to the forum to be approved. I’ll then send an additional invite to everyone there to visit my blog.

I appreciate your offer for help, and I will accept whatever you would like to provide by way of copies. I definitely intend to travel as many of the original roads that remain and I have been working on figuring out what roads those were. Likely that they took US Route 1 back up the east coast and a stretch of US Route 20 from Erie, PA through at least Ohio. Thank you for the information you have provided already.

I unfortunately only have knowledge of where they stayed town/city wise, but do have an idea of what type of accommodations they stayed in, ranging from cabins in Missoula and Tacoma, to camping by Lakes Wallenpaupack and Erie. Come to think of it there were a couple of brochures in the box that contained the postcards and letters, I’ll have to go back and look as the names just aren’t coming to me right now.

I look forward to conversing more with you over the course of this project.

By 1929 the long distance roads in this country were reasonably well developed. By that I mean they were marked with identifying signs, were at least graded, drained, and surfaced with something (gravel, shells,etc.), and it was no longer necessary to regularly ask farmers for directions. There were steep grades, dangerous curves, and boiling radiators, but the days of hub deep mud were largely past….at least on the main roads. Still, the “transcontinental” was a big adventure, and no doubt a splendid experience. I wish I could have done one back then!

They encountered a very much different countryside. We were still a country with half of our population living in small towns and villages, and small farming was still a dominant life style and occupation. Air conditioning was unknown, and whether you had hot and cold water in your hotel room depended on your willingness to pay for it….if it was available at all.

Towns and regions were still strongly differentiated and distinguished by their local resource base, whether it was fishing, lumber, river or rail transportation, mining, or whatever, and local people spoke “funny” because “talkies” and TV had yet to homogenize local and regional dialects into “American English.”

Auto camping was big and many communities ran their own auto camps to attract tourists. But by 1929 the tourist cabin was popular, and there was a booming hotel trade. In fact some 1929 hotels are still operating as hotels today, and others are repurposed. I did a road trip between Tacoma and Chicago a couple of years ago and photographed dozens of hotels that had been listed in a 1919 travel brochure. You will certainly find the same on their route.

There are probably a few places where you can drive on the exact original pavement their tires rolled on, places where the old road they followed has not been repaved or resurfaced. For example, there is a section of road west of Spokane, Washington on the Yellowstone Trail and the National Parks Highway that was paved in 1919-1920 and I don’t think it was bypassed before 1929. It is now a farm road but it is original in every respect except it has more cracks! You can see it at http://americanroadmagazine.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=1194.

I’m thinking that the women followed that route between Missoula and Tacoma. I’ll have to check to see when the newer road replaced that section.

Thank you for such wonderful information. Many of the issues you touched upon are things I plan to address as I get into this project on the blog, including excepts from postcards on their observations on road conditions, car troubles, the people, landscape, and autocamping. It truly was a big adventure to go on such a trip.

It excites me that there is a possibility of traveling the same pavement that they did. From what I have been learning in the last week, it is likely that they were on the Yellowstone Trail and the National Parks Highway for part of their journey. I do hope to stay in establishments that have been around since then, and if not that then historic homes that have since turned into B&Bs, that they could have seen in 1929.

I am still waiting the approval to post on the American Roads forum, I so look forward to being able to converse with all of you on there as I’ve only been able to read thus far.

Maria –I just discovered your blog. I am working on a novel based on a similar road trip, which in my case, was made by my Great Grandmother (43 yrs old,suffragette), her newly graduated teenaged daughter (my Grandmother, age 17) and a woman friend. Their journey took place from June to September, 1929 from their home in Flint, Michigan to Seattle (similar northerly route), south to San Francisco, then back by the Lincoln Highway in a Buick. I have GG’s journal (27 pages, single spaced typing) from which I have pieced together their itinerary. What I am trying to recreate is the “story” of what they discovered about themselves, their world and the emotional “growing up” that takes place in middle age as well as teenaged years. If you would be interested in swapping snippets, let me know. I will follow your exploits on the road. I live south of San Francisco and have been taking installments of my writing to my writer’s group in Santa Cruz.